| Mission Accomplished
Wicked Cartoons by America's Most Wanted Political Cartoonist
Khalil Bendib; foreword by Norman Solomon
7" x 10" • 208 pages • full-color
ISBN 9781566566919 • paperback • $17.95 •
"Bendib is an equal opportunity offender who connects the dots with gusto...This collection graphically illustrates the Orwellian relationship between the rhetoric of freedom among the powerful and the realities faced by those on the receiving end. These topical single-frame tableaux...are ingeniously detailed."
-- Publishers Weekly
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In an increasingly Manichean geopolitical world, Bendib happens to be both “Us” and “Them,” American and Muslim, a walking oxymoron – a “Clash of Civilizations” made flesh. He is the only American political cartoonist with an in-your-face non-Eurocentric perspective, a voice of the voiceless.
Free of the usual corporate narrative, Bendib's cartoons offer a radical, indigenous perspective in a visual medium accessible to all. They shine a light on such topics as the corrupting influence of money on democracy, African-American and immigrant issues, environmental degradation, labor and class struggles, U.S. imperialism and Zionism, the scapegoating of Arabs, Muslims and other people of color, as well as the complicity of our Orwellian mass media in maintaining the status quo.
Bendib’s cartoons are very popular with legions of alternative, educated, left-of-center readers (especially in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York and campus towns across the USA, as well as much of Canada, the UK and Australia) hungry for humorous voices of dissent and with many forgotten constituencies in this country, which are slowly becoming a majority: African-Americans, Muslims, Arabs, South Asians, Latinos, immigrants of all stripes, worldwide indigenous communities ravenous for edgy humor reflecting their specific concerns. The son of survivors of the Algerian war of independence, Khalil Bendib was born in Paris during the Algerian revolution and grew up in Morocco and Algeria before coming to California at the age of 20. After an eight-year stint with the Gannett Newspapers (based at the San Bernardino County Sun), in 1995 Khalil weaned himself from a steady paycheck by resigning in disgust over increasing censorship of his work.
Olive Branch Press
"Bendib is an equal opportunity skewer. The more a subject or victim is ignored by the mass media, the more he infuriates, informs and intensifies the reader's attention. Cartoons need to jolt. Bendib obliges page after page."
-- Ralph Nader
“Khalil Bendib always delights me with his intellectual and extremely poignant, often times sadly funny, cartoons. This book should be required reading for all concerned with social justice everywhere!”
– Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney
"Khalil Bendib is your friendly non-violent castigator of all the powers that oppress us."
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
"With his scathing and brilliant humor, Mr. Bendib connects the dots of the American political landscape like no other cartoonist alive today."
-- Michael Welles Propper
"With epic ferocity and compassion, Khalil Bendib¹s cartoons have the uncanny ability to translate for us what reality looks like to people stuck on the other side of the rail road tracks that is, 90% of the world¹s population."
-- Song Ngo Chin
"Principled dissent is the highest form of patriotism."
-- Tom Paine "The only Muslim American syndicated political cartoonist offers insights into our modern-day realities with just a few strokes of his pen. Indeed, Bendib accomplishes his mission of making us aware of the challenges we face."
--Islamic Horizons "Khalil Bendib's political cartoons elicit a mixture of reactions: anxious laughter, nods of knowing recognition, gasps of righteous indignation. Such is to be expected of an artist unafraid to call out both the left and the right, and CEO's and consumers alike. His cartoons are absurd, irreverent, and perhaps worst of all, completely true."
--Julianne Ong Hing, Colorlines
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